From Policy To Practice: Building A Truly Inclusive And Accountable Workplace

Redefining values, norms, and leadership action

We all prefer safe, inclusive, and accountable workplaces, but sometimes the culture lets us down. Certainly, companies try running programs to lead us to greater awareness and better choices. 

Yet, these often fail to achieve the desired results. Why? Can training change behaviors to ensure all employees feel safe and respected?

What Is Behavior?

My definition of behavior highlights the difficulty of instigating change. While AI defines behaviors as an organism's response to external stimuli, including actions and inactions, my definition goes to the source of where, when, if, and how they arise: 
 
Beyond mere responses, behaviors are observable expressions of who we are, triggered automatically by neural circuits in response to external stimulation. 

Standard training attempts to change behaviors by trying to change behaviors, thereby failing to change behavior at the source, leaving the neural circuitry and underlying values that triggered the actions in place, ensuring they will continue. So, as a vegetarian, presenting me with proof as to why I should eat meat would lead to me resisting because my beliefs remain intact. 

Rules Govern Choices

Once offending words and actions show up in the workplace, the problem becomes one of culture. When employees exhibit unsafe, non-inclusive, or not accountable actions, their behaviors have been tacitly sanctioned by the workplace culture; the core beliefs, norms, and rules of the company do not specifically rule them out.

Take gender discrimination as an example. For intolerance to show up, there are either spoken or unspoken agreements within the culture that make it ok. While management makes clear that discrimination is not allowed, maybe complaints are not conveyed to HR, or HR tells the victim they need to behave differently with the offending person, or the offender may be admonished and sent back to their desk. Eventually, the employee leaves the company, almost ensuring that the existing cultural norms persist.

To ensure a culture of safety, fairness, and accountability, it is necessary to actually state—in the corporate vision, rules, identity and daily communication—that any form of prejudice is cause for dismissal. Indeed, hiring practices would include vetting for respect.

Of course, rules of conduct are endemic and unique to each company culture. Most are unspoken, some are obvious: we know to wear a T-shirt at Facebook and business casual at IBM; we know not to wear a bathing suit to visit a client. But often, the rules are unstated, and hiring practices do not specify what is not acceptable.

Obviously, hiring employees with a natural respect for the values we seek to engender is a good place to start. During the hiring process, comments like:
 
Provide clarity and intention. Over time, the employee population will represent the new values. 

The Practice of Change

We currently assume that problematic behaviors can be altered when ‘good’ information is shared, understood, and practiced. But permanent change requires a modification to the system that created the problem to begin with.

Companies seeking a safer and more respectful workplace environment must change the values and norms of the company. Much more complex than merely changing behaviors, change of this magnitude requires buy-in and risk management to ensure everyone behaves using the same principles. This includes several steps: 
 

• Assemble, or have represented, all who will touch the final solution and agree on the desired goal;
• Identify the foundational values, beliefs, norms, and rules essential to achieve their goal;
• Compare the difference between the new beliefs and the status quo to recognize what, specifically, the new objective would include;
• Understand and generate working groups to navigate and resolve the risk to the system of adopting different activities;
• Understand and agree on the types of resources (a Listening course? Visiting companies with established inclusive workplaces?) necessary to achieve the new goal;
• Design an active implementation with assigned tasks, timelines, and lines of communication to include regular shout-outs to all employees in order to maintain the daily focus on the new company identity;
• Ensure hiring practices include specific mention of what is expected and what will be tolerated;
• As a continued follow-on, create a grievance committee, comprised of a group of employees that represent the different departments and roles, to take each complaint seriously; and
• Maintain semi-annual online training on change facilitation so employees understand the company’s commitment to the norms of safety, respect, fairness, and inclusiveness.

Changing a company culture is an arduous task. And it is certainly a vital one.

The Risk of Change

There is one more element to discuss: the risk of change is the elephant in the room. 

Any change in norms that a company promotes represents a risk to folks who accepted their job without knowledge of the new requirements and who do not comply naturally. These are the folks we want to reach, of course, but since their behaviors are most likely unconscious, we must help them integrate new beliefs and values to meet our new expectations. As stated above, merely telling them what is no longer tolerated will not cause permanent change. 

The question becomes, what is our risk when folks hired before the new norms were in place continue their unsafe activities? And what about those folks who cannot change but whose jobs are vital and cannot easily be replaced?

Risk management in a change of this type is pivotal: how does the innate risk get addressed once a company that has tacitly overlooked racist or sexist comments, for example, draws new boundaries of what is acceptable?

To manage risk, it is necessary for the topic to be brainstormed across the company culture. Questionnaires are sent to each employee to be discussed within their departments. Managers will discuss the necessity and risk of change at supervisory sessions.

Conclusion

We all want our workplace to be a safe, inclusive place to work, where we hire employees to carry the company vision to each other and to our clients. For this, it is necessary to hire people who will carry out the desired values and develop training programs that get to the neural sources to where behaviors originate.

The question becomes: How will you and your company know when it is time to take the necessary steps to ensure a safe, inclusive, and accountable workplace culture? And what steps are you willing to take to achieve it?

Sharon-Drew Morgen is an author of 10 books, including an NYTimes Business Bestseller (Selling with Integrity), and an original thinker specializing in systemic brain change models for decision making, change/risk management, System Dynamics, and learning facilitation. She works with organizations to facilitate learning for sales, leadership, management, and coaching practices for values-based change and decision-making. Sharon-Drew lives in a floating home in Portland, OR. Her forthcoming book is titled: Why are you asking?